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"Howl" is well named. I wonder what impression it would have made on me if I'd heard it performed rather than read it?
At any rate, I read it. It's is in three parts and in free verse. By way of preamble, I don't understand what free verse is. I think I understand that a writer might choose it with the aim in mind of conveying how people really speak. But I don't understand what free verse is, as a thing in itself, not just a thing defined negatively as verse that doesn't rhyme and doesn't have a regular meter. There are however two comments I've read on free verse that make sense to me. One was in Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and the other was in Denis Donoghue's On Eloquence. I didn't write down Fussell's comment, but it was essentially that free verse is appropriate to catalog and enumeration. This makes sense because verse that jettisons rhyme and meter needs something else to give it a spine and a skeleton, and enumeration provides such a structure. I did write down Donoghue's comment but not what text he was remarking on: "The verse is free, in the sense that one line is related to the next not by a count of syllables or spoken stresses but by affiliations of breath and cadence." This makes sense too, at least the breath part, because if your lineation is determined by the length of a breath--however literally or liberally you're defining a breath--then that breath is what gives your verse structure. I suppose your lines might also be organized as units of thought--which is really another kind of breath.
"Howl" does enumeration, using anaphora and parallel syntax. Its syntax doesn't parse, Ginsberg means it not to; the syntactical confusion mirrors the drug haze, etc. I'll quote three lines at the end of part I, the last three lines (one of them differs between my source and the version linked above) but three. Note the phrases I've bolded:
These lines describe elements of the poem they're part of: the enumeration I mentioned above, the startling juxtapositions of images and verbs and other words, the aim to capture and reflect the syntax and rhythm of prose and thought.
By way of summary, part I of "Howl" starts "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," and goes on to describe different things these best minds did and were; part II asks "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls [the best minds'] and ate up their brains and imagination?" and answers "Moloch!"; part III is addressed to "Carl Solomon!" and alternates between repetitions of the line "I'm with you in Rockland" and indented lines that start "where you [did this or were that]". That's "Howl." "Footnote to Howl" lists things that are "Holy!" In "A Supermarket in California" the poet addresses his forebear Walt Whitman; in "America" he addresses America; in "Sunflower Sutra" he addresses a sunflower. "Transcription of Organ Music" is an ironic title for the quotidian scene it describes. "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" is an appropriate title for the locale it describes. The collection ends with four "Earlier Poems," which are short and short-lined and very unlike "Howl."
At any rate, I read it. It's is in three parts and in free verse. By way of preamble, I don't understand what free verse is. I think I understand that a writer might choose it with the aim in mind of conveying how people really speak. But I don't understand what free verse is, as a thing in itself, not just a thing defined negatively as verse that doesn't rhyme and doesn't have a regular meter. There are however two comments I've read on free verse that make sense to me. One was in Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and the other was in Denis Donoghue's On Eloquence. I didn't write down Fussell's comment, but it was essentially that free verse is appropriate to catalog and enumeration. This makes sense because verse that jettisons rhyme and meter needs something else to give it a spine and a skeleton, and enumeration provides such a structure. I did write down Donoghue's comment but not what text he was remarking on: "The verse is free, in the sense that one line is related to the next not by a count of syllables or spoken stresses but by affiliations of breath and cadence." This makes sense too, at least the breath part, because if your lineation is determined by the length of a breath--however literally or liberally you're defining a breath--then that breath is what gives your verse structure. I suppose your lines might also be organized as units of thought--which is really another kind of breath.
"Howl" does enumeration, using anaphora and parallel syntax. Its syntax doesn't parse, Ginsberg means it not to; the syntactical confusion mirrors the drug haze, etc. I'll quote three lines at the end of part I, the last three lines (one of them differs between my source and the version linked above) but three. Note the phrases I've bolded:
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
These lines describe elements of the poem they're part of: the enumeration I mentioned above, the startling juxtapositions of images and verbs and other words, the aim to capture and reflect the syntax and rhythm of prose and thought.
By way of summary, part I of "Howl" starts "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," and goes on to describe different things these best minds did and were; part II asks "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls [the best minds'] and ate up their brains and imagination?" and answers "Moloch!"; part III is addressed to "Carl Solomon!" and alternates between repetitions of the line "I'm with you in Rockland" and indented lines that start "where you [did this or were that]". That's "Howl." "Footnote to Howl" lists things that are "Holy!" In "A Supermarket in California" the poet addresses his forebear Walt Whitman; in "America" he addresses America; in "Sunflower Sutra" he addresses a sunflower. "Transcription of Organ Music" is an ironic title for the quotidian scene it describes. "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" is an appropriate title for the locale it describes. The collection ends with four "Earlier Poems," which are short and short-lined and very unlike "Howl."